Stuff that should be pretty clear but somehow isn’t

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This little comic shared by someone on Facebook recently kinda got to me, because it’s so simple and happy. There’s so much cynicism in the world today, so much negativity about who we are and what’s happening to us, not just in America but all over the world, except for a very few places that seem to have figured out that it’s not always about money.

Even the stuff that is supposed to be uplifting comes across to me as either creepy Randian “success” stories or syrupy, condescending twaddle. I was starting to watch a documentary on PBS about North Korea and I just had to turn it off, it was so disturbing to me. And as much as I feel for the people who live there, I also feel for the people of West Virginia, who for years have enthusiastically voted for people who have, for decades, been poisoning them. And I have very little confidence that things will change: like alcoholics, it’s not something that can be imposed from without, it has to come from within, and after so many years I just don’t know if they’re capable of understanding that there’s no honor in suffering.

I wish things were that simple, that life wasn’t such a hardship for so many reasons. It doesn’t have to be this way, but we work so hard in making it that way that you wonder if this is what people really want: to work at jobs that make them miserable, to watch TV shows that are primarily about people screaming at each other or ridiculing people who are less fortunate, to take pleasure when they see someone else suffering. To literally take food away from children and just throw it away. This isn’t happening in some Third World country like North Korea, it’s happening here, and there’s absolutely no reason for it.

Something has to change, and what makes me sad is that it will either take so long that I won’t be around to see it, or that the change itself will be worse than what we have now. And what makes me sadder is that we bring it on ourselves.

If the circus was in town, maybe I’d go. If I could borrow a couple of bucks from someone!